Paper details

Paper authors	Deena Dajani
In panel on	A world without camps? Understanding the potential for refugees and IDPs to achieve well-being and decent livelihoods in urban areas.
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Within development studies, well-being emerged as an important concept within the shift from income-based assessments of poverty towards multidimensional understandings of human progress that recognise the relationship between greater quality of life and human progress. Several approaches to exploring well-being and development have emerged, notably Sen’s conceptualization of well-being within his functionings and capabilities framework, and the work of the Wellbeing in Developing Countries (WeD) group at the University of Bath. By comparison, very little attention has gone towards examining the importance of understanding well-being in humanitarian contexts, including situations of protracted forced displacement. This paper argues that researching well-being in situations of protracted forced displacement can produce a shift from dominant frameworks that focus on the prism of needs and vulnerabilities. The paper will present a well-being in displacement framework that is being developed and refined through the research process to account for topographies of sociality (individual, group/community, collective) and topographies of spatiality (camp, urban, transnational). Together, this enables understanding refugee/IDP lives as they interact with their place and environments, how they exercise agency and what inhibits this exercising of agency, and how those multiple factors impact on refugees’ and IDPs’ outcomes. The authors will present initial findings from focus groups conducted in Kenya and Afghanistan that explore the mix of meanings, strategies, and priorities that forcibly displaced men and women associate with well-being.

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